In the realm of the sensual

While Gary Hume finds beauty in the banal, Patrick Caulfield is just too brainy to be moving

Open invitation: the doors to the Gary Hume show, painted by the artist (Nick Ansell)

Gary Hume is something rarely encountered in British art: a sensualist.
British art is good at producing satirists, fantasists, conceptualists,
nature worshippers, animal-lovers, moralists, Luddites and sexual obsessives
with a cruel edge — the Spencers, the Gills, the Freuds, the Ovendens. And,
judging by the recent spate of artistic ennoblements on the birthday honours
list, it has also become particularly good at producing social climbers. But
sensualists, no.

The problem is, I think, that all the things British art is innately good at
involve the maintaining of a distance. ­Satirists mock others. Fantasists go
elsewhere. Animal-lovers prefer beasts to humans. Sexual obsessives see
their partners as legs of mutton. But sensualists must adore the sensations
they are celebrating and give ­themselves up to them. They must relinquish
control and embrace abandon. And that is very un-British.

However, you can see Hume doing exactly that on the painted doors with which
he